VI
Susan To Jimmy
"I suppose you'd really like to know what I've lately been up to; but I hardly know myself. It's absurd, of course, but I almost think I'm having a weeny little fit of the blues to-night—not dark-blue devils exactly—say, light-blue gnomes! I hate being pushed about, and things have pushed me about, rather. It's that, I think. There's been too much—of everything—somehow——
"You see, my social life just now is divided into three parts, like all Gaul, and as my business opportunities—Midas forgive them!—have all come out of my social contacts, I'll have to begin with them. Maltby's the golden key to the first part; Mr. Heywood Sampson, the great old-school publisher and editor-author, is the iron key to the second; and chance—our settling down here on the fringes of Greenwich Village—is the skeleton key to the third.
"I seem to be getting all Gaul mixed up with Bluebeard's closets and things, but I'll try to straighten my kinky metaphors out for you, Jimmy, if it takes me all night. But I assume you're more or less up to date on me, since I find you all most brazenly hand me round, and since I wrote Phil—and got severely scolded in return; deserved it, too—all about Maltby's patiently snubbing me as a starving author and impatiently rushing me as a possible member for his Emancipated Order of Æsthetic May-Flies—I call it his, for he certainly thinks of it that way. Now—Maltby and I have not precisely quarreled, but the north wind doth blow and we've already had snow enough to cool his enthusiasm. The whole thing's unpleasant; but I've learned something. Result—my occasional flutterings among the Æsthetic May-Flies grow beautifully less. They'd cease altogether if I hadn't made friends—to call them that—with a May-Fly or two.
"One of them's the novelist, Clifton Young, a May-Fly at heart—but there's a strain of Honeybee in his blood somewhere. It's an unhappy combination—all the talents and few of the virtues; but I like him in spite of himself. For one thing, he doesn't pose; and he can write! He's a lost soul, though—thinks life is a tragic farce. Almost all the May-Flies try to think that; it's a sort of guaranty of the last sophistication; but it's genuine with Clifton, he must have been born thinking it. He doesn't ask for sympathy, either; if he did, I couldn't pity him—and get jeered at wittily for my pains!
"Then there's Mona Leslie, who might have been a true Honeybee if everybody belonging to her hadn't died too soon, leaving her hopeless numbers of millions. Mona, for some reason, has taken a passing fancy to me; all her fancies pass. She sings like an angel, and might have made a career—if it had seemed worth while. It never has. Nothing has, but vivid sensation—from ascetic religion to sloppy love; and, at thirty, she's exhausted the whole show. So she spends her time now in a mad duel with boredom. Poor woman! Luckily the fairies gave her a selfishly kind heart, and there's a piece of it left, I think. It may even win the duel for her in the end. More and more she's the reckless patron of all the arts, almost smothering ennui under her benefactions. She'd smother poor me, too, if I'd let her; but I can't; I'm either not brazen enough or not Christian enough to let her patronize me for her own amusement. And that's her one new sensation for the last three years!
"Still, I've one thing to thank her for, and I wish I could feel grateful. She introduced me, at one of her Arabian-Nightish soirées musicales, to Hadow Bury, proprietor of Whim, the smarty-party weekly review. In two years it's made a sky-rocketing success, by printing the harum-scarumest possible comment on all the social and æsthetic fads and freaks of the day—just the iris froth of the wave, that and that only. Hadow's a big, black, bleak man-mountain. You'd take him for an undertaker by special appointment to coal-beef-and-iron kings. You'd never suspect him of having capitalized the Frivolous. But he's found it means bagfuls of reelers for him, so he takes it seriously. He's after the goods. He gets and delivers the goods, no matter what they cost. He's ready to pay any price now for a new brand of cerebral champagne.
"Well, I didn't know what he was when Mona casually dropped me beside him, but he loomed so big and black and bleak he frightened me—till my thoughts chattered! I rattled on—like this, Jimmy—only not because I wanted to, but because having madly started I didn't know how to stop. I made a fool of myself—utter; with the result that he detected a slightly different flavor in my folly, a possibly novel bouquet—let's call it the 'Birch Street bouquet.' At any rate, he finally silenced me to ask whether I could write as I talked, and I said I hoped not; and he looked bleaker and blacker than ever and said that was the worst of it, so few amusing young women could! It seemed to be one of the more annoying laws of Nature.
"The upshot was, I found out all about him and his ambitions for Whim; and the fantastic upshot of that was, I'm now doing a nonsense column a week for him—have been for the past five—and getting fifty dollars a week for my nonsense, too! I sign the thing "Dax"—a signature invented by shutting both eyes and punching at my typewriter three times, just to see what would happen. "Dax" happened, and I'm to be allowed to burble on as him—I think Dax is a him—for ten weeks; then, if my stuff goes, catches on, gets over—I'm to have a year's contract. And farewell to double-room-and-alcove for aye! Else, farewell Whim! So it must get over—I'm determined! I stick at nothing. I even test my burble on poor Sister every week before sending it in. If she smiles sadly, twice, I seal up the envelope and breathe again.
"That's my bird in the hand, Jimmy—a sort of crazily screaming jay—but I mustn't let it escape.
"There's another bird, though. A real bluebird, still in the bush—and oh, so shy! And he lures me into the second and beautifulest part of all Gaul——
"It's no use, I'm dished! Sister says no one ever wrote or read such a monstrous letter, and commands me to stop now and go to bed. There's a look in her eye—she means it. Good-night and good luck—I'll tell you about my other two parts of Gaul as soon as I can, unless you wire me—collect—'Cut it out!' Or unless you run down—you never have—and learn of them that way. Why not—soon?"